


First as the Shadows

by TourmalineGreen



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Appropriate Use of the Force, Blood, F/M, Generational Trauma, Major character death - Freeform, Post TLJ, Reincarnation, The Force Has Plans, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, Violence, buuuut not the way you think, buuuuuut not the way you think, force mythology, if you tilt your head and squint, or maybe sort of, semi canon compliant, the force has Reasons, underworld themes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-07-21 01:17:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16149500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineGreen/pseuds/TourmalineGreen
Summary: Ren is becoming a problem. No—Ren is a problem. Unhinged, undisciplined, unfit for leadership of the First Order. When the Supreme Leader fell, Ren presumed to take his place. Through his powers, through his otherworldly grasp on everything but himself, Ren presumed, and Ren succeeded. But Hux knows now that he is unfit. Ren is a threat, and like any threat to order, he must be eliminated.//Across the stars, Rey awakens in a cold sweat, her skin still shivering with the memory of sparking electricity...





	1. disconnect

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is dedicated to everyone in the Reylo fandom who's encouraged and stuck with me. You all know who you are. Thank you, and enjoy the ride.

_disconnect: to sever or interrupt the connection of or between; detach_

* * *

 

_Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night_

_the beloved body, compass, polestar,_  
_to hear the quiet breathing that says_  
_I am alive, that means also_  
_you are alive, because you hear me,_  
_you are here with me. And when one turns,_  
_the other turns—_  
  
A Myth of Devotion, excerpt  
  
\- Louise Glück

 

Ren is becoming a problem. No—Ren is a problem. Unhinged, undisciplined, unfit for leadership of the First Order. When the Supreme Leader fell, Ren presumed to take his place. Through his powers, through his otherworldly grasp on everything but himself, Ren presumed, and Ren succeeded. But Hux knows now that he is unfit. Ren is a threat, and like any threat to order, he must be eliminated.

It’s easy, surprisingly easy to accomplish; Ren sleeps, like any man does. Ren’s grasp of that strange, invisible power is the first thing that must be neutralized, so Hux searches the galaxy, and finds what he needs. Within two months, he has it. An indescribably rare toxin, distilled from a venom of a highly endangered serpent, one that lives on a dying moon; he administers the distillation in Ren’s quarters as a gas, along with a strong sedative. The man wakes almost instantly, bellowing like a wounded animal, enraged, but the toxin has done its work. When the guards come in next, Hux watches as Ren grasps uselessly in the air, stunned and terrified when nothing responds.

The Force does not answer him.

Hux feels the side of his face ache, the memory of Ren throwing him against the control panel, and he smiles. On the screen, the guards take out their stun batons.

He gives the order.

The shocks arc across Ren’s skin, and now, there is no Force to protect him. No comforting shield, no buffer between him and pain. They shock him until he goes down. Again and again, until his limp body twitches on the floor. Not quite unconscious; barely clinging onto awareness.

“Hold,” Hux says, and the guards obey.

Hux comes around the corner, down the hall, greeted by the smell of singed hair and flesh. He sees Ren, lying still on the floor. Alive, but only just.

Best to be sure. Hux takes out his blaster and fires. Two quick shots, directly through the man’s heart.

“Put the body in an escape pod, and fire it towards nothing,” Hux says.

He will give the story he’s rehearsed: Ren, struggling with his own weaknesses, succumbed to his wretched superstitions and deserted the First Order. He was weak, and unstable; few will weep at his loss. Hux is content that nobody will ever find the remains. Let it rot away, let the last of the Skywalker bloodline find its fitting, ignoble end.

The Supreme Leader is dead. Long live the Supreme Leader.

* * *

Across the stars, Rey awakens in a cold sweat, her skin still shivering with the memory of sparking electricity. It tastes bitter in her mouth, and her heart pounds as she reaches out for the comfort of the Force.

Warm and familiar now, the Force answers her. She takes a breath of clean, cool air, and reaches her thoughts towards the wall she’s built, to keep Kylo Ren’s intrusion from discovering her whereabouts—but there’s nothing. No—worse than nothing; there’s a gaping emptiness, tinged with ash and the taste of something foul and bitter, and beyond that…

Rey sits up in her cot. He isn’t there. Kylo… Ben isn’t there. Something is terribly wrong, because all she’s ached for is peace, a severing of this connection between them, and now that she has it, it feels like a limb cut off, like a bloody, aching stump, the nerves still firing, uselessly.

Out of instinct, she searches for him. Follows the void, pushes past her distaste, trying to understand. She raises her hand to her chest and presses there as she concentrates, searching, searching—there. As if in a trance, she pulls at threads of the Force, wrapping them around him, weaving them though his skin, his bones, his nerves. The effort it takes is enormous, almost more than she can bear, and at the moment of weakness, when she feels herself faltering, another energy joins hers, reinforcing the connection. Then another. Then a third. Rey has a brief impression of Luke, and two others, each distinct and yet unknowable, before the strength goes out of her.

She falls back onto her narrow cot, unconscious.

* * *

“Rey…”

It’s Finn who finds her, his worried face what she sees when she wakes, at last, from her stupor. Rey blinks and focuses. The light is wrong for morning. For a moment, she feels as if she’s been pulled completely out of her body, shoved hastily back in, like clothes out of a travelling case, readying for a sudden evacuation.

“I’m alright… I was just…” her voice trails off, uncertain. What _was_ she just doing? The memory of it, of her strange dream, dissipates like smoke across the horizon.

Finn smiles at her, but she can feel his hesitation. Slowly, he helps her sit up. Rey rubs at her face, trying to clear the last remnants of a too-deep sleep from her eyes.

“How long was I out?”

“You missed morning meal,” Finn says, sitting beside her as she adjusts on the cot. “We all thought you were just tired, but then, when I came in, I couldn’t wake you…”

“I’m alright,” Rey says. “Just a dream. Or a… premonition, perhaps. A vision… I can’t remember more than bits and pieces.”

Finn frowns slightly; Like so many others, the Force moves around him, but he cannot dive into it. Not like she can, anyway. Although, Rey supposes, every living thing can, potentially, learn to sense it. Some come to it more easily than others. And Finn, he trusts her, cares for her with deep friendship, but the idea of the Force still bothers him on some deep, visceral level. Stormtroopers are raised to deal with threats that are physical, tangible… So he doesn’t pry. Just gives her a reassuring smile, and reaches for the tray he’d set down on the bedside table.

“Here,” he says. “Nothing too exciting. Just porridge, fruit, tea.”

“Thank you,” Rey says. She takes the tray and begins to eat.

When the last of the Resistance had sped away in the Falcon, they’d charted a course to the very outskirts of inhabited space. Set down on a planet with plenty of native lifeforms, but none of them had been sentient, which meant abundant hunting, but no cities or settlements. It was a perfect place to hide, and to recover. They’d only been there a few weeks at most, and so far, had seen no hint of the First Order, even after their signalling beacons had been sent out, sending their encrypted distress call to the outer reaches. The First Order hadn’t found them yet, but all of them knew it was only a matter of time.

But the planet, at least, was as lush and abundant as Jakku had been desolate. There was grain from the fields, brought back and cooked down to a simple but filling gruel that was better than most of the rations Rey had lived on most of her life. There were fruits here, and plants and edible roots. Rainwater collected in huge, cuplike leaves in the nearby jungles. Not too far away, a system of caves warmed by the planet’s own geothermal heat had made for a useful living space. But now, as Rey looks around the cave where she’d set up her cot, she feels closed in. Like she’s been trapped in a too-small space, with the walls pushing in…

Something of the fear-memory flickers over her; Rey startles. Finn is still watching her, trying to understand. She gives him a reassuring smile.

“I think I’ll take the day and meditate,” Rey says. “Hike up to the top of the falls, see if I can get some answers.”

Finn nods. She can feel that he wants to ask to go with her, but he holds the words back. Just nods, squeezes her hand, and stands. “I’ll have some supplies gathered for you when you’re ready to go.”

“Thank you.”

Rey watches him rise and leave, the cloth flap falling back to cover the entrance to her cave. She looks down at the food, and continues eating; even at her most unsettled, there’s nothing in the galaxy that can unnerve her into passing up food. She cleans her bowl, not thinking about the taste, and tries to remember the images from her dream. All she can recall are impressions: Fear and pain; betrayal and rage; that metallic taste in her mouth, and a creeping, poisonous green mist that clouds her memory.

None of it makes sense. And although it frightens her, Rey feels her first impulse as sure as anything: She wants to reach out to Ben. But she guards against it, and waits, until she knows she can do it safely. If their past encounters were any indication, she could only see him, and he, only her—not her surroundings, not the planet’s location. Rey hadn’t been able to sense his surroundings, but she had been able to sense his emotions. Skimming across his brain like a stone across a pond—no, across a roiling pit of lava, more like. It was an experience which had shaken her and unnerved her, and also filled her with pity. He was terrible, and vulnerable, and violent, and shattered, and none of it excused the rest of it.

Rey realizes her hands are shaking. Her restraint sorely tested. But no—she can wait. She must wait. Just in case her theories are incorrect. The last thing she wants is to draw him closer to them, to finish what he’d started.

She sets off as the sun rises against a wide, leafy backdrop, walking the trails that she and others have carved out of the forest. There’s an outcropping, about a half-day’s walk up the rocky pass, and it reminds her, in a way, of the place she’d first meditated with Luke. But when she gets there, and the wind pushes back her hair from her sweat-covered brow, Rey looks out across not oceans, but green. Endless, beautiful green. For the shortest of moments, the thought tempts her: She could just stay here, forever. Let the past die, truly and completely. She isn’t afraid of being alone. Not now, not with the Force to guide her.

But she shakes her head, and clears the selfish thought away as quickly as it had come.

 _Get out of my head, Ben,_ Rey thinks. Sure that the temptation is somehow his fault.

She hears nothing from him in response.

Carefully, Rey sets out the shielding pulse generator, which will allow her to slip into the Force without drawing too much attention. It was one of the General’s inventions, which had surprised Rey. Leia had pressed it into her hands when Rey’d first set off, telling her that there had been times when she couldn’t risk drawing attention to herself, once she’d been known for her true parentage. There had been many in the fledgling senate who sought to destroy all traces of Darth Vader’s progeny by any means necessary.

Rey takes a deep breath, feeling the soft, slipstream hum of the shields as she settled into her meditative pose. The Force is there, as always, like a note that had been plucked by a distant stringed instrument, holding itself on the wind, waiting to be made into a symphony.

Gently, Rey reaches out further. Across stars and countless worlds. Letting instinct—letting the Force guide her.

 _Ben should be here_ , Rey thinks, frowning. She’d anticipated his dark little raincloud lurking somewhere on the horizon. But he isn't.

 _Maybe you’ve learned how to shield yourself,_ Rey thinks. _Well done._

There's no answer.

Rey’s frown deepens. There's an echo of… something on her tongue. Acid green and sour, like rotten flesh. She briefly considers breaking her meditation to take a drink of water, but she holds, and waits.

There.

Something is smeared across her senses. Something dark, like an infection, like a stain. It draws the light towards it, and yet repelled it all in once.

Rey pushes closer, as close as she dares to go.

It wasn’t like the cave beneath the island. This is a single, fixed point. Almost like an entity.

No—a wound.

It calls to her, not in temptation, but like a drowning, desperate thing. Trapped and screaming, losing strength, it flails like an animal in a trap. It aches, deep inside her own body, too.

If the Force had a voice, it would be screaming.

All at once, Rey feels a presence join her. In an instant, the memory of the dream—no, it had been real, or something more than real, something else—returns to her, like the sharp snap of a current coming to life beneath her fingertips. The three Force-beings compel her forward, surrounding her, supporting her, shielding her. She steers closer to the inkblot wound, peering over the edge, hating and fearing what she knew she would see down there.

Rey gasps, and her eyes flew open.

Ben Solo is dead.


	2. voyage

_voyage:_

  * _a course of travel or passage, especially a long journey by water to a distant place._
  * _a passage through air or space, as a flight in an airplane or space vehicle._
  * _a journey or expedition from one place to another by land._



* * *

 

Rey recoils, nearly falling off the rock where she’d been sitting, cross-legged, in serene repose. She feels anything but serene now; her heart is pounding, her skin crawling with the wrongness of what she’s just felt. Blindly she reaches out with the Force again, calling on the ones who stood beside her, just moments ago—none of them answer. Not in words, at least. All she feels is a tug, somewhere behind her navel, as if some unseen hook has grabbed her and wrenched her forward. An urge, to move, to run, to flee.

She exhales, a soft noise escaping her lips. A wordless cry, swept away by the wind and the sunlight. Where is she to go? What is she meant to do? All at once, panic wells up within her. 

_ Center. Stillness. Quiet.  _

Luke’s meager lessons return. A moment later—ten breaths, two-dozen heartbeats—the feeling begins to recede. But Rey still feels sick to her stomach, the porridge sitting in her gut like sand, like lead. She reaches down to her pack, hands like claws on the canvas as she wrenches it open, picks up the flask of water and drinks it down. No hint of her scavenger’s reserve, just thirst, desperate and hungry. She finishes half the flask, hoping to rinse the sour taste from her mouth. 

If only rainwater could cleanse the images from her mind. 

How could this have happened?

If he was dead, he would be—nothing to her, Rey guesses. Neither a void nor a light, but like nearly all the others who had died. She has not ever sensed Han in the Force, despite trying; Luke comes through only as faint whispers, only when he, it seems, chooses it. The lovers and spouses and lost fellow Resistance members are silent, too, despite how much Rey knows that those who remain want to hear from them. And Rey doesn’t know how the Dark Side works; perhaps there is some other path, some third path, which turns him into this malevolent, dark stain. She discards this theory, knowing, somehow, that this isn’t the case. If Ben Solo truly were dead, he would either have gone entirely, or become one with the Force. 

Can those who have gone as dark as he return to the light, in death? Rey doesn’t know. There’s so kriffing much she doesn’t know.

But the bond remains. Drawn taut across the space between them like silk from a sandspider, pulling and tugging, wrapping around itself. A dark cocoon, the contents of which Rey has no sight of. 

No. This is wrong. 

Something is wrong. 

Rey presses her palm flat against the rock behind her, steadying herself. She has never felt vertigo, not even when perched upon the highest points of the wrecks out in the sands of Jakku, but now, looking down across the forest that rolls out to the sunlit horizon, she feels as if she’s falling. Endlessly falling. With a sharp breath, she pulls her eyes away from the sight, and looks back, towards the rock. 

It’s as if there’s someone else there beside her, another indistinct presence that is screaming at her from across a chasm of energy, voice muffled, straining to get through. A message she can’t understand, coming in on a badly-tuned radio. 

On a hunch, she deactivates the shielding and tries again, throwing open her own mental shields, leaving the connection between her and Ben wide open. For a brief moment, there’s a sensation of free-fall. Panic and that closed-in feeling follow close on its heels. But Rey also feels the others, Luke and the two whose names she does not know, once again beside her. In her body she feels the rock under her palm, the solid ground beneath her feet. Despite how real this other-sense feels, she knows she is safe. They are here to guide her, to teach her… something. 

She presses forward. Closer and closer. If he was asleep, she could sense his dreams now. Rey recalls the ones she’s seen, slid into like slipping between the sheets of a stranger’s bed. He dreams in bright sparks, impulsive flashes, needy and hungry—for power, for touch, for justification and righteous victory. Sometimes, he dreams of… other things. His dreams are like blades, sharp and dangerous and brittle. Wounding everyone he touches, but most of all himself. His dreams are indistinct, and frustrating, and in all of them he is bound and restrained in some way. Running without moving. But there are no dreams to visit. If he was alive, she could—

Rey flinches, and lifts her other hand, pressing it to her chest, above her heart. 

Pain. 

So much pain. 

It unspools around her, coiling, pulsing, throbbing. She opens her mouth and wants to scream, but she cannot find the air. The world is a vacuum. Everything is death. 

_ Go to him, _ a warm, comforting, stranger’s voice says in her mind.  _ Go to him _ . 

Rey nods, but she does not understand. 

It smells of blood, and Rey opens her eyes, looking down hazily at her black-clad chest, feeling the hot press of blood seep out from under her fingers. Smelling burnt flesh. Feeling—oh Force—she’s in his body, she’s  _ him _ , seeing what he’s seeing, before unconsciousness takes him once more. 

_ Ben!  _ Rey cries out through their bond. 

He doesn’t answer. 

Rey wrenches herself out of the Force, surfacing like she’s been too long in a tight compartment, waiting for the passage of a storm. Her throat is dry, dry as the sand that fills a forgotten Star Destroyer, dry as the promises of her parents, whose faces she cannot truly recall. 

Nothing has changed around her: The forest is still green, the rock still solid, the sun still warm on her face, the air still faintly humid when she breathes it in. And yet everything has changed. 

_ Isn’t this what you wanted? _ A dark little part of her prods.  _ To sever this bond, once and for all? To disconnect it? After all the damage he’s done, after all the innocents he’s killed… don’t you truly want to be free of him? Wouldn’t it be a kindness, to you, to everyone? _

And, even quicker, her truer self responds:  _ Not like this.  _

Rey stays only a moment longer, looking out across the planet. Then she packs up her flask, hoists her pack over her shoulder, and begins her descent. 

How is she ever going to explain this to Leia?

* * *

“I need to go away for a while,” Rey says, and she isn’t surprised by the look that Leia gives her. “I saw something, last night… and again, today, during my meditation. I need to follow it, and see where it leads.”

Leia considers this for a moment, her face just as expressive as her son’s, and— _ Force, _ Rey thinks;  _ I hope she didn’t hear that _ . 

If she can, she doesn’t show it. Leia sighs, and sits down slowly and carefully on the stone bench near one of the consoles currently tracking her distress beacons. So far, there’ve been no replies. 

“Where do you need to go?”

“Not far. I’ll need to take the Falcon, but I’ll be back.”

Leia looks down at her hands, her gaze unfocused; Rey can sense that the older woman is considering, turning over the possibilities and risks like she’d appraise any bill that had once been brought before senate review—not just within the comforts of her own mind, but out there, in the Force. Leia has always been far too composed, too shielded, too controlled for Rey to even begin to guess at what she found there, but when she looks up, Rey senses contentment. Peace. 

“I trust you, Rey,” Leia replies. And that’s good enough permission for her. 

Rey makes ready to depart, dodging Finn’s curious questions and ducking away from the confused looks that the others send her. The Falcon is the largest ship they have now; the rest of the Resistance fleet has been destroyed, save for two transports. Poe had said, once, that they were the sparks that would light a fire that would burn the First Order down, but at the moment, Rey doesn’t feel like a spark, more like an ocean, a tidal wave of energy that’s waiting, urging, pushing her forward. 

She doesn’t speak of her mission. Doesn’t tell anyone where she’s going because honestly, she doesn’t quite know herself. Not yet. Rey catches a glimpse of the technician, Rose’s face as she’s about to board the Falcon, and she knows that many of them worry that Rey is leaving for good. Leaving them stranded. 

She wants to tell them to have faith. She cannot find the words. 

* * *

Death is oddly peaceful. He opens his eyes and looks around, seeing nothing but a faint blue haze, and tries to lift his hands to card through it. It is the Force, he knows, but it is oddly still. With great effort, he lifts an arm, watching as it moves in little eddies, avoiding his touch. No matter how he moves, he cannot grasp the energy in his hand. It slips through, like light, like he is nothing. 

He closes his eyes again. Drifts. 

When he opens them, he cannot tell how much time, if any, has passed. His head feels free, mind separate from his body, and he knows, distantly, that this ought to distress him, but it doesn’t. He isn’t even himself—not really. His arms are not his own. His legs, his hands, his face. He’s someone else. He is himself. He’s nothing. Just particles, bits of space-debris and junk, colliding for only a moment in a cold, uncaring universe. Just some trash left behind before a jump. 

How wonderful it is, he thinks, to be nothing. 

He closes his eyes. 

Centuries later, or perhaps it is only seconds, he opens them. Now, he is in his body, or very nearly, and he doesn’t like it. Wishes he could go back to the place with the soft blue light. There is only darkness now, surrounding him, within him, in his lungs as he breathes, in his ears as he tries to hear, under his nails like dried blood, darkness on the soles of his feet from the steps he’s taken. This hurts. This hurts _ hurtshurts—stop—let me go back there—let me _

He closes his eyes. 

* * *

Rey lifts up into orbit around their planet, scanning the skies with all of her sensors, but there is no sign of the First Order. Maybe it’s a trap. Maybe he’s done something, pulled on some thread, used some dark power to draw her to him. Maybe she’s running, open-armed, towards her death. 

But she doesn’t think so. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like… like the moment, the brief, peaceful moment, when they’d been as one. There, in Snoke’s throne room, when the last guard had fallen, and Ben had risen before her, instead of Kylo Ren. It had been so close to her vision. So frustratingly close. But then it had pivoted away, and he’d gone down a path that she could not, would not follow. 

In that moment, though… 

Rey closes her eyes, and listens. Her guides are amused with her. She can see them, feel them, a little more clearly now. One of them reminds her of Ben, but… not quite. The other seems to find this whole situation as overwhelming as Rey does, but Rey cannot discern why. 

Luke is there. 

_ What do I do? _

He smiles at her. Rey can feel it, she can almost see it, the kindness in his eyes. He is young-old in this moment, like the way she last saw him, and also not. Luke’s mouth doesn't move, but Rey hears his message in her thoughts, like the recollection of a memory that does not belong to her, but feels safe and familiar. 

_ Go down, to rise up. Go back, to go forward.  _

A gentle, silent instruction is pressed into her mind, and Rey’s hands move over the console almost without her complete awareness. They are giving her coordinates, readying to make the jump to lightspeed. She hears a laugh, not Luke’s, but one of the others’, before she pulls out of the Force, and checks the coordinates she’s set. From the third presence, she feels… warmth. Gentle reassurance. There is no darkness here, only darkness on the horizon. 

Rey checks the coordinates again, and frowns; no known planet lies at the destination. 

But the guides who stand beside Luke urge her on. Rey doesn’t hesitate. She engages the hyperdrive, and feels the familiar drop in her stomach, then the surge, as the shift pushes her back against the pilot’s seat, stars streaking across the windows. It will take some time before she reaches the coordinates, and what she finds there, she doesn’t know. 

It must be night time, back on the Resistance planet. Rey feels tired all at once, like she’s released some energy, or been relieved of some duty of which she was not aware. She sags back, closing her eyes as her head rolls to the side. She should really get back to one of the bunks, and sleep properly, but it’s too much effort. Only a moment, she thinks. 

* * *

She dreams. 

The grass is green, brighter than green, some other color that Rey would’ve been astonished by, were she not who she is in the dream. 

The sky above is blue, delicate clouds dotted along in the air. 

The woman in whose mind Rey now visits, these scattered memories, recall visiting this favorite place before; Rey’s awe is dulled into warm familiarity. Home, but… not. 

Her heart feels… she feels whole, complete, right, in some sublime, unknowable way. Her clothes are different, and she feels like she is in a different body, somehow, but still herself. It’s difficult to define, or describe, and she finds that the more she focuses on it, the more it recedes. 

So she relaxes. 

The less she struggles to contain it and define it, the more the dream plays out before her. Like a holovid, but one that’s taking place in her, with her, through her. 

_ Watch _ , it seems to say.  _ Understand.  _

She lays on the grass, smells the sharp, sweet scent of it, the loamy earth below, the flowers and something else, a familiar and wonderful scent that reminds her of spice, and fruit, and shadow. It is bitter, faintly bitter. But the rest of the dream is so sweet, Rey ignores it. Chooses not to taste it. 

Her body is bathed in gossamer sunlight; She is there, and then she is eclipsed. 

There is a presence beside her, she realizes. Above her? Direction is meaningless and interpretation impossible. Rey turns to look at it, but she sees nothing, not a trace of another person. There is only the sweet grass, and the distant bitterness. There is only the flower-embroidered memories, the rush of a distant waterfall. A waterfall that surrounds her, rising up around the meadow like the edges of a bowl. How could she not see it before? It is rushing towards her, yearning for her, beautiful and wild and dangerous. It will drown her, submerge her in its beauty and cold cruelty in an effort to embrace her. But she throws her head back, and she laughs. Everything is perfect. She need not worry about the water, about the rush, about the oncoming danger. 

_ I love you, _ she thinks. _ I love you, and you will be my destruction.  _

Rey who is not Rey dreams. 

The alarm blares to life, waking her abruptly. She rouses herself just as the ship drops out of lightspeed, half expecting to see nothing at all, half expecting to see the First Order waiting for her. This could all still be a trap, somehow. Ben… Kylo could’ve found some ancient Sith technique, to lure her out through their connection. She ought to know better, ought to remain wary, guarded—despite the way she feels for him.

But there is a small planet up ahead. Even from space it looks lush and blue-green. Rey adjusts the ship to make entry into the planet’s atmosphere. The planet is small, inconsequential, and, by the looks of her scanners, uninhabited. Wait, no. One life form. It could be an error; the lifeform scanner she’d found cobbled onto the Falcon had come from a Guardian-class patrol ship, a completely different wiring and sensor array, difficult and uncommunicative with the Falcon’s three brains. But Rey feels a prickle up her spine, and she knows, she knows, who she will find down there on the surface. 

Blue or green… will he be on land, or in the water? She shivers, remembering the beauty and the fear of her dream. The idea of a sand-rat like her even encounting enough water to drown in would have been absurd, once upon a time. But the fear had been real. And this planet is real as well. Rey leads the Falcon down, and further down, until she’s very nearly on top of the location. Just as she approaches, the sensor gives a little bleep of an alarm, and she can smell the relay as it fizzles out, overloaded. 

Of course. 

Nothing is going to be so easy, is it? 

The Falcon beeps, alerting her that contact has been made, and begins balancing the compression and air mixture in the ship in preparation to open the ramp and door. She gathers her pack, and her water, and her staff, and she heads down to the surface. 

What she finds, though, is the last thing in the galaxy she expects to see. She’s in a clearing, circled by towering pine trees. And at the edge of the forest, a figure stands. Rey sets her pack down, slowly. Watching. Wary. 

What is this?

“Hello,” the boy in front of her says. He is lanky and lean, and his dark eyes are wide and curious and trusting. His dark hair is overlong, a bit tousled, and his face is angular, softened only by the last traces of baby fat in the roundness of his cheeks. Prominent ears stick out from beneath his hair. He’s clad in a simple brown tunic and dark blue trousers, scuffed a bit at the knees, with brown boots that are solid, but worn and a bit muddy. He looks like he’s just been playing, running through the woods that surround them. 

He might be seven, eight years old, or younger, and tall for his age. 

Rey opens her mouth to speak, mind not quite comprehending what she is seeing. Because it can’t be, it just  _ can’t.  _

And yet it  _ is. _

“Hello,” Rey manages. “Are you… how did you get here?”

The boy squints up at the sun momentarily, and then looks back at her, smiling. “Dunno. Where did you come from?”

“I came from… I’m looking for someone.”

The boy’s smile is brilliant, innocent. “I can help! I’m really good at finding people. Mom says…”

His voice trails off. For a moment, it seems as if the boy is distracted by a sound from the forest that only he can hear. But then his attention is back on Rey, and he smiles again, content. 

“Can I help you find who you’re looking for?”

“Yes,” Rey says, but she’s guarded. This cannot be real. He  _ cannot _ be a real child, the only resident of this lush, deserted little world. She notices, in the neckline of his tunic, that there is a cord, a necklace hanging there, but she cannot see what it carries. “What’s your name?”

The boy hesitates, and Rey does not have a great amount of experience with children, but she knows the next answer will be a lie, or at best, a half-truth. 

“Bail,” he says. A little too confidently. 

“Nice to meet you, Bail,” Rey says. “I’m Rey.”

“Hi.” He shifts, like he wants to run and play once more, all restless childhood energy. “Do you know which way your friend went?”

_ He’s not my friend,  _ Rey wants to correct him, but if this is who she thinks it is, then the distinction doesn’t matter. To be perfectly honest, she doesn’t know who she thinks this is, truly. It must be some kind of Force projection, some illusion. She wonders if she reaches out, will the boy be made of flesh and bone, or will her hands pass through him? She can sense him, through the Force, but only as she senses others, like Finn and Poe, who cannot interact with the Force. Rey collects herself. 

“I don’t know which way he went. Maybe… can you take me to your favorite place to play?”

“Sure,” he says, as if this is a perfectly normal question. “C’mon.”

He turns, and walks into the forest.

Rey can do nothing else but follow. 


	3. subsume

_subsume: include or absorb (something) in something else._

* * *

Supreme Leader Hux is only marginally more content in the next day’s waking hours than he had been with Snoke and Ren skulking around, but at the very least, he’s in control now, which is everything he’d ever wanted. No more mystic religious drivel, no more unseen hands and conjured lightning. Just order and structure. The way things ought to be.

This pleases him. It makes him feel as if he can, at last, achieve what he’d been working towards for the majority of his young life. Ambition, some said, was a corruption, which could destroy a man even as he achieved the greats of heights; Hux had read that in a philosophy text somewhere, and he had sneeringly dismissed it as so much trite Jedi garbage. There was no corruption in his ambition, just purpose, steadily honed, finely attuned, focused and precise. He knows what he must do, and he sets about to doing it with all of the resources of the First Order finally at his disposal.

The first to go are the Knights of Ren. He dispatches the remaining Force-users, the ones loyal to Ren, with cold efficiency. The last remains of the toxin are a worthy price to pay to get those sycophants out of his life. This is his superweapon; this is his new Starkiller. And it almost seems too easy. He burns their bodies, feeling, for a moment, a twinge of regret that he did not do the same with Ren. But then he discards this as worthless nonsense; no man can recover from two blaster bolts to the chest. And he’d been dead, quite dead, when he’d been jettisoned to the outer rim.

Perhaps Hux should’ve done it with Ren’s own weapon. Given the man a taste of his own sparking fury, as payback for the numerous consoles he’d destroyed in his ridiculous, childish tantrums. That would’ve been poetic.

Hux has the saber still; he does not know, yet, how to dispose of it. So it sits in a secure vault in his personal quarters, encoded to his biometric data, and no other’s. A memento, of a sort, for a man who could never be described as sentimental.

The First Order will sweep across the galaxy, starting in the core worlds, settling the primary capital on Chandrila. It pleases him to think of sit where the New Republic first had been established, walking the halls of the old senate house, rather than returning, as some had expected, to Coruscant. There are enough Imperial sympathizers on Chandrila to support a rather peaceful takeover, and returning to Coruscant feels like he’s going backwards, back to the failure of the Empire, rather than conquering the garden where the New Republic first took root.

He does not intend to ignore Coruscant, however; Hux personally oversees the plans to cleanse that filthy world, capturing freighters as they try to flee, Resistance sympathizers, or those who have grown weary of the tradeoff in power, or underworld scum, with allegiance to no one. He intends to extend his reach, diversifying the placement of his fleet, and ensuring that he can never be targeted in one broad swipe. He is calm, he is careful.

He is the Supreme Leader, and at long last, nothing can stand in his way.

And yet: The first night of his supremacy, Hux is filled with a restless, nervous energy from the moment he enters his chambers. It isn’t guilt, or fear, or anything so simplistic and childish. He feels merely… excited, he supposes. Although that isn’t the right word for it either.

Hux sits on the bed, trying to still his mind, trying to calm his breath. It is late, and he’s never been one to deviate from the set patterns that are best aligned with his physical and mental needs. Perhaps if he lays down, readies himself for sleep, he will be still.

It doesn’t work, but Hux refuses to relent. His body, his thoughts, they are not subject some mystic whims that buffet the universe in their cruel, invisible currents. He is a biological organism, a creature of rule and order. He does not bow to sentiment, or to faith, or fate.

He hesitates a moment longer, then summons, from a med droid, a sleeping aid.

As it takes effect, Hux feels himself sink into a deep and even sleep. His eyes are heavy, and his body, in the last flickers of consciousness, feels cold.

And then—

—heat, oppressive heat, blasting the side of his body as a weight bears down on him. Red fills his vision. Red on the horizon, draping across the horizon like a veil. Below, on the surface of the planet, faces turn upwards to watch their destruction. They scream, or cry, or pray. He is all of the mothers embracing their children, or calling to them, as they run and play carelessly in a field, or bring them sleepily to their breast. He becomes the lovers sleeping deeply, on the dark side of the planet, or fighting, or fucking. Men, laughing together as they work in the fields, singing the harvest call-and-response rhymes, reading to their sons as the children fight sleep with their endless questions. Elders, their eyes soft with memories. Songs, half-sung, cut off by a fierce blade of red that incinerates and consumes.

This is what he has wrought, Hux knows; he watches from a distance, and yet inhabits every single body on each of the planets as they die. He feels them, each and every one, as they die screaming, or in their sleep, or frightened, or desperate, or just one moment there, and the next—

Hux wakes, sweat-soaked and panting, in his bedchambers. He does not dream. He does not. The images must be… some terrible side effect of whatever that blasted droid gave him. Some aberration. Something wrong and broken, a sickness, a disease. His heart is thudding in his chest. He calls for another droid, and demands a full physical scan, and then a second, when the first reveals nothing more than an elevated stress profile. He is not dying.

This was something else.

* * *

Rey follows the boy into the forest, seeing a narrow, winding path that looks as if it’s been trampled over time by human feet and the paws of little woodland creatures. Although she hasn’t seen any creatures, hasn’t heard any cries or calls, either. Just the wind, as it blows through the trees. So far as she can tell, the planet’s entire population has doubled with her arrival: Her and the boy. Bail.

She knows that isn’t his name.

Having seen through Ben’s eyes, walked in his memories, the ones he shared with her during their strange moments of connection, she can feel that this child is Ben. Not Ben, as he is now; Rey can’t sense the boy through the Force, not in the slightest. If she concentrates, as they walk, she can feel the Force swirling and undulating around everything that is alive on this planet, and it ignores the child entirely. Just passes straight through him.

And yet as he walks, his footfalls snap twigs on the path, dislodge leaves and dirt. He leaves no footprints behind him as he goes. He is here, and yet he is not.

Perhaps this is some other-Ben. A Ben who might have existed, in some other timeline, some other reality. Perhaps if Ben had not been born with the power of his Skywalker ancestry, but instead taken after his father; perhaps if he had been born with only a subtle energy, one that could lay dormant and not be used to fulfil some prophecy. If he had walked in his mother’s footsteps, studied diplomacy and politics. A Ben who might’ve lived a more normal life.

Rey reaches out with her senses again as they walk onwards, trying to feel where the real Ben truly is; if not here, then where? He’s certainly on the planet somewhere, but… she cannot sense him. Each time she pushes closer, the energy, the dark, writhing cocoon of energy around him shifts away.

She is not meant to find him; this is the only conclusion that Rey can reach, and it frustrates her. The Force is, once again, being playfully confusing. Master Skywalker must’ve learned that trait somewhere, Rey thinks as she walks. There is something here she is meant to do, something she is meant to learn.

The boy—Bail, or Ben—is taking her somewhere. And Rey must follow.

They keep on walking. The forest seems endless, rich and evergreen, with a soft blanket of brown pine needles on the ground, dampening their footsteps.

The sun is high overhead when Rey realizes that she’s completely forgotten her pack. It’s such a ridiculous mistake, but it makes her stomach clench in fear as she turns back to look the way they’ve came. None of it looks familiar at all.

“Wait,” she says, and the boy stops, and glances back at her.

“What’s wrong?”

“I need to go back; I left my pack by the ship.”

He smiles at her, and Rey’s heart clenches now at the sweetness of it. “Oh, we’re not far. There’s everything you need just up ahead. We can come back for it later.”

He turns back around, and starts walking again, assuming she’ll follow, but Rey doesn’t move. “My… medkit, my supplies…”

The boy looks back at her. Rey can’t say it, but of course her thoughts are on the broken lightsaber in her pack. She’s never been apart from it, not since the day it was split in half. One day, perhaps with guidance from those who’ve come before, she’ll rebuild it. The great Jedi masters of old would surely come back to help her repair it, if they meant for her to have it. For now, it’s a relic, a piece of technology she intends to study, to make new, in her fight against the Dark Side.

Privately—under the gaze of the boy’s dark eyes ahead of her—Rey thinks, _I wonder if Ben knows how to fix it…_ But she does not say this aloud.

“Are you hurt now?”

“What?” Rey asks, confused.

“You said you needed your medkit,” the boy answers. Reminding her of words and worries that have already started to slip her mind, here in this place. “Are you injured?”

“No, I’m… I’m fine.”

The boy smiles. “Well come on, then!”

Rey nods. What was it that she had forgotten? It must not be of any consequence; she turns back the way the boy is leading, and continues on her journey.

How long have they been walking? Rey squints up at the sky, trying to discern the placement of the sun. She is used to the desert, and its endless horizons, dunes and relics. This place, this forest, obscures the truth, and it feels that no time has passed, and also as if she’s been walking for days. Just as she is about to ask him, the boy scampers up over a little rise in the trail, out of sight for one brief moment. Then Rey, speeding up, crests the hill, and she smiles as she looks down across a little river, cutting through the trees. The boy has run down to the river, and is standing there on one foot, pulling his boot off of the other, smiling at her.

“C’mon! It’s cold; feels good on your feet.”

Rey comes down the little hill, and sits down on the riverbank, pulling off her own shoes and carrying them as she stands and wades into the water.

It is just a little river, only a few steps across, and the water is cold and perfectly clear. Little pebbles line the bottom, round and easy to walk on. Rey can’t resist a shiver of delight that courses through her at the sensation. She is, and perhaps always will be, a desert creature; this feels like bliss. Cold water rushes around her ankles, as deep as it goes, and she kicks a little of it into the air, watching as the light catches it before it falls to earth.

What purpose could the Force have, leading her to a gentle place like this? There is no true danger around her, nothing shielded or concealed, save for the true location of the real Ben Solo. His physical form is somewhere, but she can’t find it. If anything, this place feels like the Force laid bare. Like some pure place, in a time before time. Before Light and Darkness were at war and out of balance.

That realization shocks her a little; she’s grown used to thinking of the light as good and the dark as evil, but nothing’s so simple as that; the sun is warm, but could burn her skin. The dark is cold, but the shadows are a welcome reprieve. One should not exist without the other. It’s so simple, Rey laughs. The boy laughs, too, and flicks water in her direction, a playful duel.

The little river, and the smooth rocks, and the sound of the child’s laughter, downstream, as he plays, and the light in the trees, and the grass, and the forest, and the wind… this is a place of peace.

Rey smiles, and walks downstream, keeping the boy in sight.

She can see that he’s built a little bridge with the rocks, crouched down in the river, heedless of the way it soaks his trousers and shirt. Mud squelches between her toes, and Rey laughs, watching the way he pushes the mud from the riverbank up to support his bridge. The water, such a gentle trickle, is easily shaped and stopped by his crude and messy creation. It wells up behind the bridge, then spills over it. The boy scowls at this, and swipes the rocks aside, letting the water rush past.

“I can never get the bridge to go over the river,” he says, looking up at Rey and squinting against the sunlight that illuminates this part of the river. “It always dams the river, or knocks it aside.”

Rey considers this. She’s been inside of countless ships, studied diagrams and figured out which beams are the sturdiest to climb on and hang from. She crouches down in the water beside the boy, and together, they work on their little stone bridge. He’s serious, so diligent and focused. The water rushes over her legs, but she can’t worry about that. They try, and try again, eventually laughing each time their creation topples.

She can’t remember ever just playing like this, and certainly not with water. At this age, Rey was living in a dusty pile of scrap that barely passed for shelter. She was thin and gaunt, rags and skin and bones, still haunted by the memory of food, any food, that didn’t come with the crunch of sand in her teeth. The thought of water, a quantity larger than a sip… an entire mouthful, two, or three… She had been Unkar Plutt’s favorite scavenger, small enough to climb into the narrowest, most dangerous parts of the wrecks. He’d even give her a tiny bit of bacta paste, if she’d been a good girl, and found what he’d asked for. Just a drop of it, no bigger than the size of her thumbnail. She’d have to choose which burn or scrape was the worst, and spread it out thinly to make it cover as much of her injuries as possible. Those had been the good days; it’s only now that Rey realizes what a cruelty it was, to make a child choose which injury to mend, when the ability to heal them all had been easily available.

Rey hesitates, her hands in the cold water, as the boy plays beside her, humming a little song as he builds and rebuilds. She rises to her feet, the cold seeping into her skin once more, and lifts her hands to examine them. It’s just mud on her hands. Not the cuts and scrapes, not the burns from the sun-baked metal.

She shudders.

The sun is starting to fade.

“We should…” Rey begins, but she doesn’t know what to do. The memory is overwhelming.

Beside her, the child stands up.

“It’s just mud,” he says. An echo of her own thoughts. “You can wash it off here in the water.”

Rey nods.

The boy gives her a curious look, then bends down, and plunges his hands into the water. Rey does the same. Abruptly, she straightens, and sees her boots, sitting there on the shore. She hadn’t even realized she’d put them down. Rey steps carefully over to the side and picks them up, drying her feet on the grass as best she can before putting the boots back on.

“C’mon,” the boy says, picking up his own shoes and carrying them. “It’s not much farther.”

Rey follows.

* * *

The river winds down through the forest, widening and deepening slightly before the trees begin to thin, and a meadow appears before them. The blue sky overhead has given way to a beautiful sunset, but the sun is at her back now, when it was before her as they walked.

 _This place makes no sense,_ Rey thinks. And then: _Does it have to?_

Night falls swiftly as they cross the meadow. The boy walks, as ever, ahead of her, still humming his song as he goes. The meadow had seemed passable when she’s been on the edge, but now, it feels as if they can walk and walk, and still end up just approaching the middle.

Darkness embraces the sky. Rey looks up, and sees that it is velvet-black, and starless. Like someone has drawn a curtain across a stage, and forgotten to light the lights.

The boy ahead of her stops, tilting his head back as he yawns. Rey feels it too, the aching weariness of her body and mind.

“You can sleep by the river tonight,” he says, taking a few steps closer to the water and sitting down in the soft, flower-strewn grasses. “It won’t get too cold.”

“What about you?” Rey asks. “Where are your parents? Isn’t there anyone here with you? You said you were taking me to… to…”

She doesn’t remember.

“My parents aren’t here,” the boy replies. In the fading light, she can see that he’s picked one long blade of grass to fiddle with. “They won’t be back for a while… but it’s safe here. You’ll be safe.”

 _I’ve accomplished nothing._ Rey sits down, cross-legged, opposite the boy. If she had her pack, she could light a fire, but the night is warm. If she had her pack, she could eat some of her rations, but she finds she isn’t hungry, either.

“Did your parents leave you here?” Rey asks, softly.

The boy looks up. She can see the expression on his face, even on the starless night. It looks pained, like she’s hit too close to a wound.

“They said they’d come back, and visit,” he replies. “They said this was… it was better like this. Safer.”

“Safer for whom?” Rey can’t help but ask.

The boy doesn’t answer. Just fiddles with the grass.

“What do your parents do?” Rey asks. “What are they like?”

The boy throws the blade of grass away, and frowns as he searches the ground for another one that’s suitable. Makes a face at her that’s just so perfectly Ben, it almost makes Rey laugh aloud. “Dunno. Dad’s always busy. Mom… she has work to do, in the sen—”

He stops at this, and looks up. “She takes me to work with her, sometimes. But it’s boring.”

Rey swallows thickly. She wants to be able to say something, to comfort him, but she knows that his view of hs parents—even his view through the eyes of this strange child—will be unshakable, and impossibly different from the way she sees them.

Saw them, anyway.

Han Solo had been dashing, the stuff of legends… but perhaps legends were difficult to keep pinned down in one place. What would he have done with a Force-sensitive child the likes of which Ben must’ve been? Rey didn’t know Han well enough to even begin to guess. And Leia, she was a General, a Princess, a Senator, commanding and bold and sure. Moreover, she was of the same Force-sensitive line, an inheritor of that power, too. She would’ve guided her son, Rey thought. Kept him close, protected him. Surely she would’ve done so; Ren must’ve turned due to his own folly, having been raised in a life of comfort and privilege.

Wasn’t that what parents were supposed to do?

Rey resisted the urge to snort an undignified, bitter laugh; she, of all people, had no possible touchstone to try and give proper parenting advice.

The boy was still sitting opposite her, looking at the grass in his hands, trying not to get caught looking at Rey. In an instant, the direction of her thoughts turns as sharply as the wind before a sandstorm, and she tries to reconcile the sweet face before her with the red-tinted face she saw, the man who had driven a saber through his own father’s heart. This child does not look like a murderer. And yet he is. Or will be. Or was.

Perhaps there is no time in this place at all.

A thousand questions ran through her mind, each as impossible to ask of him as the last:

_Why did you kill your father?_

_What made you turn?_

_You had people who loved you. Why did you reject them?_

_Why are you appearing to me like this, like a child?_

_What do you want me to learn?_

_What am I even doing here?_

This little boy, this child, there is no way he can answer any of them. Rey knows this. Whatever, whoever he was, or will be, he is not now.

And thinking any farther than that just gives her a headache.

A heavy tiredness soaks into her limbs, just as the single moon begins to rise on the horizon. It is a great, ripe full moon, clear and heavy in the sky above her.

Rey lays down, pillowing her head on her arm. It is not the most uncomfortable place she’s slept. Maybe she can find a way to ask her questions come morning. She watches as the boy lays down as well. His dark eyes are open for a while, and then, drowsily, they close.

Her eyes close, too.

She sleeps.

* * *

Rey lifts her hand, and feels a band of metal there on her brow. It is a crown, and once again, she knows she is not herself. A fire burns in a hearth that surrounds her, warming her. Her shoulders are bare, her arms covered but not entirely like she is used to.

Her body burns.

The hearth surrounds her, a fire that echoes the inevitability of the waterfall from her last dream; Rey remains strangely apart from the dream, out of control, as if it’s a holovid that’s playing out before her. She is in the body once more, but it is not her own. The fire reaches out to touch her, and Rey wants to flinch, knows it will burn her—and yet her body responds.

Pleasure.

Her hands reach out, inviting the fire in. It licks a trail across the tops of her exposed breasts, edging along the line of her tight-fitting garment. She whimpers; she _aches_. And the fire burns her and leaves nothing but urgency in its wake.

Rey licks her lips in the dream, and her mouth tastes like sweetness. Like salt. Like ash.

She whispers a name, a silent name, a true name, one that burns on her lips like flames. She is sweltering; she is being consumed. She surrenders.

The flames reach out to trail through the black, beaded drape that hangs from her throat. The flames unclasp it, and it falls away.

In the dream, she breathes him in. Fills her lungs with fire, and smiles as she surrenders to it. He is everything to her; he will consume her, devour her, drain her of every last scrap of life, and she will still rush headlong into the flames. This is the power of desperate love, a love that knows only possession. The fire slides a red-gold hand beneath her skirts, and she tips her head back, and back, until the world tilts around her. She is falling, into the flames.

Rey startles awake, feeling herself panting in the cool night air. She is too warm, too warm from the dream, from the feelings it awoke within her. Those are feelings that decidedly do not belong to her, a longing for another man, another darkness. And yet she knows them, the way she would know a song played on a dozen different instruments. The minor melody is the same, lilting, desirous, entrancing. Terribly sad. Shifting onto her back, she tugs at her arm wrappings, trying to get some coolness onto her skin. In her dream she’d been wearing them—no, something like them, she doesn’t quite remember. Rey takes in great mouthfuls of air, tasting the sweet grass that surrounds them, hearing the gentle trickle of the nearby stream.

When she looks up, the boy is gone.


	4. descent

_ descent _

  * _an action of moving downward, dropping, or falling._
  * _the origin or background of a person in terms of family or nationality._



* * *

The world is turning around him.

Turning, like the saber on the ground before him. 

Turning, like the endless spiral of pain within him. 

The stars wheel around him in the heavens, and the twisting vines of electricity wrap around his body. They hold fast, and cut deep. Lashing and tearing. 

That, at least, is a pain which is familiar. 

But the body is unfamiliar. It weighs on him, on his shoulders, on his leaden legs. He is severed and malformed; he is a corpse in a walking coffin. It binds him, restricts. Down on the ground, a young man in black writhes in pain, reaching up. 

_ This is my legacy, _ he thinks, in the words which are not his own. 

_ This is my lesson, _ a second voice answers. 

The world turns. 

He’s twenty-two when his world turns upside-down. Twenty-two, bisected into two clean sets of eleven: Before, and then after. But the voice has been there from the start; it tells him what he wants to hear. He’s special, he’s afraid, he’s destined for greater things. Hands pull him away from what he loves; two depart from him, blurring with the tears he will not shed. Is he running on the desert sands? Is he looking back, at a mother he has never seen before, and will never see again, save for when she dies in his arms? Red and black, blades whirling in the desert, flames licking at a body. 

The end of things, the beginning. 

_ Be strong for me, and don’t look back,  _ she says. 

But:  _ I know my son is gone. _

Is he even himself, anymore? Has he ever been only himself?

He doesn’t know. 

At twenty-two, teetering on the line, the knowledge of his bloodline shatters him; it makes him new, and whole, and filled with terrible purpose. At last, he has a name. One he chooses, not bears as a banner for others. 

This throne room is red. He breathes in the full awakening of the bond that has grown between them, knowing then as he has known since he saw her: This was not of Snoke’s doing. That much he knows for certain, as much as he can know anything. She is his, of him, in him, through him; he is hers, in her, with her, through her. Their umbilical connection nourishes and sustains, until the deed is done. 

This throne room is blue. He exhales, a mechanical wheeze, and sinks down, listing to the side, sparks shattering from his wrist as the boy holds him. The boy, who will one day be the man who wakes him in from the darkness of yet another poisoned dream.

He is saved, there, in that room. He is damned. 

Green light, piercing the darkness. 

_ Help me take this mask off, _ he begs. 

Once again, he is a child in a mask. 

_ Let me look on you with my own eyes... _

Death tastes like rotten things, like failure, like futility; he is never enough, never able to stop people from leaving. They say they’ll return, but they never do. Duty or fate prevents it. He is alone. Alone on a ship, and  _ space is cold _ . 

_ Father, please _ .

And he wants to scream at the Force itself, beg from it: What do you want from me? Boy or man, son or father, legacy or lunacy; the voice pulls at him and twists him like pulled sugar-candy around a stick. Molding him and unmaking him. Stretching him, preparing to consume him. 

_ Don’t you turn against me! _

She is here: lover, sister, wife, mother. All and none. No-one. Nothing. Everything. She is in his veins, flowing beside all the others. She is the sweetness, the light, the fresh press of pain that cauterizes the wound he has become. He wants her here, with him, more than anything he’s ever wanted in his life. 

He wants her to flee, and to leave him to this, the pain of his own making, and many generations besides. He wants her to go, and not look back. To be safe. 

He turns, and turns, and retreats back into black unconsciousness. But although he cannot see them, his guardians stay beside him, holding him in the Force, waiting. 

Waiting.

* * *

Rey wakes in the middle of the meadow, feeling the cool morning sun on her face, and the wind as it blows through her hair. It’s come loose in the night, fallen down from its single binding, and she pats around in the grass where the impression of her body has tamped it down, finding the little cord there and finger-combing it back. 

She’s still here, then. The resonance of last night’s fire-bright dreams still dance upon her skin, and she is briefly glad not to have awoken with a sleeping child nearby; she hopes very much that she had not called out in the darkness. 

That, atop everything else that is strange about this place, would be too much to explain. 

Rey stands and stretches. The breeze is cooling on her arms, and she—

Her arms are bare. 

Rey frowns, and looks down at the grass again. Her arm wraps are nowhere to be found. 

Strange. 

She half-remembers taking them off the night before. But the way this place works, the way her mind feels languid and slow, the way the Force itself seems to drape over her like a warm, comforting blanket… thinking back even that far is too much. 

So she stops looking for the wraps in the grass, and stretches once more. 

It’s a golden morning, sun cresting over the hillside, stretching towards the forest on the other side of the valley. They had made camp, such as it was, at the bottom of a gentle bowl. Rey can see the river running down from the treeline, widening as it reaches where she now stands, and then turning, meandering further down through the grasslands. 

Years of self-denial have made it difficult, sometimes, to tell if she is hungry or not. Rey considers her body, relaxing into herself and trying to discern whether she is or no. She’s not hungry, just thirsty. And the more urgent needs of her body, which can be taken care of behind a tallish stand of bushes, about four meters away. 

Before she does her business, Rey looks again around her; the boy is absent, and she ought to be concerned, but she isn’t. Something in the Force tells her that he was fine enough before she came, and will show up when, and if, he wants to. 

Rey stands, and stretches once more. She walks down to the river, crouching down by the side and washing her hands, splashing some on her face, just for the novelty of it. She cups her hands and drinks, then; the water is cold and sweet, and it fills her belly like food. 

When she stands, she sees him. The boy. 

“Hello,” he says. He’s smiling at her, wind tousling his hair, which seems… a little longer today, Rey thinks. It’s nearly past his ears.

“Good morning,” Rey replies. “Did you… sleep alright?”

He nods, and looks away, towards the horizon. “We can get going as soon as you’re ready.”

“Alright,” Rey says. And then, before she can stop herself: “Where were we going, again?”

The boy smiles at her, broader this time, an absolutely adorable flash of crooked teeth and dimples. “To find your friend! All we have to do is follow the river. It’s not far.”

Rey nods, feeling foolish, then guilty, as the purpose comes back to her. It’s just that it’s so hard to hold onto things in this place. Memories, identity… or perhaps, it’s just that she’s so very present, in the moment, with the golden sunlight on the grass, the light dancing on the water, the boy, Bail… 

_ Ben. _

“We should get going, then,” Rey says. 

And the memory of the wound aches in her chest. 

* * *

They walk on. 

Rey looks up, squinting at the sun, trying to gain a sense of direction. The forest seems close still, but they’ve been walking for some time now, following the river. The sun is overhead, so it must be midday, but time is so hard to pin down in this place. Time, thoughts, memory… 

She pushes her hair out of her eyes, and tries to fix it back in the tie with marginal success. When she looks ahead, the boy is still walking. 

He’s pulled up a long piece of grass, swinging it to the side, watching the feathered end brush along the tops of the other tall tufts they pass by. Playful arcs, overlaid in her thoughts with a crimson blade.

Rey studies the boy as he leads her, trying to figure him out. At first, she’d thought the longer hair was just… not remembering what he’d looked like, yesterday. But now she’s sure that he’s actually a little bit older. His sturdier, taller. Different. Closer to ten years old, if she had to guess. 

She’s never been good at guessing ages; having grown up with so many species, and how different humans and humanoids are in their age cycles, makes it a challenge. 

Regardless, Rey thinks, she feels oddly… protective of the boy, even as she still feels wary. She thinks that a child like him never would’ve survived on a place like Jakku. He’s water-soft, would’ve fallen off a dune and been lost forever. He isn’t hardened, like she is. 

That thought makes her feel guilty, somehow.

She’s not sure why.

The boy urges her to follow the river down the valley for a short while, until it meets another river, cutting a swath through the wide, grassy plain. She hasn’t grown hungry yet, or tired, but it seems like a good place to rest. And her feet feel good in the cool water of the now-wider stream. Rey leaves her boots on the shore, beside the boy’s, as they wade a little way in. When she looks down, to where the stream is headed, it seems to stretch on into an indistinct horizon; when she turns back, she cannot see the forest at all. 

_ How will ever find my way back to the Falcon?  _ Rey wonders. Maybe she’ll stay forever in this place, forgetting and being drawn along by a child who is something else entirely. For a moment, the fear overtakes her, and she has to close her eyes, still her thoughts, and feel the Force’s reassuring guidance. 

She is not being lead anywhere dangerous. 

This is safe, here; this place, this planet, is safe. 

But there is work yet to complete. 

“Let’s play a game,” the boy says, distracting her from her subtle meditation. 

Rey looks at him; he’s smiling up at her, crouching down by the edge of the river, picking even pebbles out and finding ones that seem to match some specific criteria for size and shape. 

“Alright,” she replies, and wades back over to the shore. 

He settles in, crossing his legs and finding a stick in the dirt beside them. Rey watches as he draws a careful grid in the sandy soil, and then he sorts through the pebbles, finding eight of them that are around the same, small round size. Flat like coins, the stones have been tumbled and rolled smooth from the flow of the river. 

The boy places the stones down around the borders of the game board he’s drawn. As he places them, Rey realizes that they’re red. Has he… changed their color, somehow, in the palm of his hand? No, they were always a russet red-brown stone, Rey thinks. She must’ve just been mistaken. 

In the center, two stones are placed. Apart from their size, they are not similar at all: One is jagged, a dark, almost volcanic stone, with sharp edges. The other is a pale agate, tan and marbled through with blue. 

The boy looks at her; Rey is held captive by his eyes. There’s a wisdom in them, an ancient knowingness that frightens her, draws her in. 

“It’s not really a hard game to play,” he says, smiling once more, childlike and open. “We take turns, moving in these pieces, here…”

His dirty finger points to the red, even stones. 

“...and then the two in the middle have to jump them, to capture them.”

Rey nods, taking him as seriously as she’d take any other earnest child. Even if the game seems simple enough to her. There’s something else being said; she can feel it, the golden tendrils of the Force weaving around them. 

Rey doesn’t understand. 

“You go first.” He flashes another grin at her. “You always go first.”

“Do I?” Rey laughs. “I’ve never played this game before…”

In an instant, the memory overtakes her: She is nine years old, or as best as she can estimate, without a memory of her birthday or age. Sobbing, she is huddled against the thin metal wall that separates her from the howling sandstorm outside. The metal is corroded; red rust comes away under her nails, stains them there, beside the blood she’s shed, picking out wires and fastenings, scratching out her existence in the belly of an forgotten war. 

She, too, is a forgotten relic. She closes her eyes against it, but the sound of the wind, that low, unholy howl, reverberates through her brain like the scream from a vibro-blade. 

_ Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop. _

She covers her ears with her hands. Begs the wind to stop, but it doesn’t answer her.

It sounds too much line an engine. It feels too much like pain, the last time she saw her parents’ ship…

Rey picks up a stone, and moves it, setting it down in another square, not really understanding. The white one has gone to the edge, and the black one is all alone, surrounded. 

When had those other pieces moved?

She looks up, into the boy’s frightened eyes. 

“No!” he cries out, real terror in his voice. “They have to stay together!”

He stands up abruptly, scattering the stones at his feet, boots smearing the gridlines of their game. Rey looks up at him, sees the way his face contorts in abject fear. He looks across the horizon now, sun slanting across his face, casting his features in sharp shadows, sharp as the volcanic stone in her hands. 

His eyes widen. Whatever it is he sees, Rey cannot discern. 

The howl comes again. Wind-spun sand, glancing against the metal wall. A creature, bellowing a hunting cry. No—just the wind.

All the hair on her arms stands to attention. 

“They were supposed to stay  _ together _ ,” the boy repeats. This time, on the edge of a sob, emotion choking thick in his throat. 

“ _ Ben _ ,” she says. 

The boy looks down at her. He shakes his head. Horror is painted on his face, white and crimson.

And without another word, he turns, and runs into the tall grass. 

* * *

Rey stands up, looking for him. But he is gone. Whichever direction he went, Rey cannot see or hear or sense him, any more than she could when he was in front of her. She closes her eyes and reaches out with her senses, remembering her mission and her call. 

There. The dark, writhing, pain-fueled tangle is still on this planet, but Rey cannot tell where it is, or find her direction. 

When she looks back down, footprints track through the grid, the gameboard that he had drawn for them in the mud. Only her footprints, of course; the boy has left no trace of bent grass, muddy track, nothing. Rey leans down and digs out the two central pieces. They’re mud-smeared and filthy in her hands, but she goes to the river and washes them clean.

The river water is cold, but the stones warm in her hand the way desert-stones hold the noonday heat. 

_ They were supposed to stay together. _

Rey holds them close, then tucks them safely away in her pouch. She stands back up, looking out across the land. Moments ago, it seemed, the sun was overhead. Now, it’s starting to tilt towards the edge of the valley. Or maybe it’s just suspended there; time and distance seems to have no meaning in this place, and her arms ought to feel bare without their wraps, her belly ought to feel empty without her rations—her hands ought to feel unsettled without the saber nearby, without the books, without any supplies at all—but instead, she feels a peace settle over her, like a cloak.

All is well.

This place is where she’s meant to be. She can feel that, even now. The Force is humming along beside her, soft and sure. Gentle voices, their words indistinguishable yet comforting, affirm that feeling, even amongst the strangeness of this place.  

And the boy… wherever he is now, if he even exists right now, Rey doesn’t know. 

Rey looks back towards the river, back the way they—the way she’s come, she supposes. If Ben-as-Bail won’t come back to guide her, then she’ll have to go it alone. Assume he was guiding her anywhere in the first place. 

Assuming she can even get back to where she started. Because now, in the lazy afternoon, Rey is forced to admit that she probably stands no chance of finding the Falcon now—even if she does turn back, follows the river into a forest.

Rey squints, and looks to the horizon. 

There isn’t even a trace of a forest at all. Just endless grasslands, just the valley, and the sky, and the river.

_ What do I do? _ She thinks, slipping into the Force easily, welcoming the light.  _ Where do I go? _

The answer is clear:  _ Forward. _

So she begins to walk.


	5. unveil

_ unveil: remove a veil or covering from, especially uncover (a new monument or work of art) as part of a public ceremony. _

* * *

He runs, but he cannot escape it. Grinning, hungry creatures at his heels, snarling and snapping and laughing, even in the depths of his dreams. Their bodies shift and writhe, like living nightmares: First armored, chitinous, many-legged and hissing; then, scaled; then, furred, with massive wings that snap like thunderclaps in his ears. They shift, and shift, and shift. The worst of them, glittering smoke-white, exudes from his very pores. It is not him, but it is inside of him, a terrible thing. He sobs, and he tears at his skin, and he runs, and runs, and runs.

They are not real. Neither is he, but it hardly matters. 

The frightened darts through the trees, chased by nothing but his own formless fear. Inside his coffin, half-alive and fighting to die, the man writhes and shudders. Damn the Force, and damn the ones who keep him here. 

_ They were supposed to stay together. _

How many times has the boy been left behind? In one form or another, in one way or another. His heart pounds, his blood races, he struggles in his entombment against the well-meaning bonds. He is alone, alone alone  _ alone alone alone _ , ever always. 

But it wasn’t like this, at the start. 

This is the lie of the Jedi: That love is weakness, madness, wickedness. Love consumes, devours, pollutes. Better to remain apart, veiled and contained. Secure, behind a barrier of indifference, cloaked as safety. 

The boy knows this to be a lie before the lesson can ever truly be imparted. With ancestral knowledge he knows it in his mother’s sand-warm arms, a memory of another child’s last embrace. In another lifetime, he knows it as he sees the truth dawn in his sister’s eyes as they meet beneath a canopy of trees and starlight. He knows it in every life, the little shard of Force incarnate in his flesh, the piece of him that remembers, but only when it returns to its source. He  _ knows _ . 

And yet, that is not the totality of the lesson he has been shaped to know. 

That is not why the shard keeps returning, generation to generation. Love is a given. The purity of love is intrinsic to life, from the first tender spark of it to the last gasp. Beginning to end. 

The lesson he must learn is deeper than that. He knows what it is, but he is afraid of it. Because to acknowledge the lesson means acknowledging his lack of understanding, his fear. It means turning around and facing what pursues him. It means admitting that what pursues him has been inside of him the whole time, and will never, ever relent. Fear. Fear of loss. Fear of separation. How can one bear such a burden? How can one process such a truth? 

Easier just to run, and so the boy runs, from her and from the lesson, chased by fear, into the darkness of the woods. 

* * *

Rey wanders a bit more, following nothing more than guesses, wishing she could find him. She veers from the comfort of the river, through the grassy, waist-high fields, until she finds the border of the forest. She pauses there at the edge, looking in through the branches, wondering if this is forward, or doubling back. She’s long since left the pathway, such as it was. Maybe it had been the child who’d made the path in the first place. There’s certainly no sign of life here, even still. No insect, no foraging animal, no bird. 

On instinct, and from lack of any better options, Rey sits down, folding her legs and settling into a meditative pose. 

As before, Force is just… there, the moment she searches for it. It spirals around her, comforting and familiar and wild. It greets her like a lover, invites her in. 

_ Come, _ it seems to say.  _ I have so much to show you.  _

Rey takes a breath, then another, then another. 

She closes her eyes. 

This time, when the dream begins, Rey is aware that it is not a dream. 

The last two, the dream of the rushing wave, the dream of the all-consuming fire, had come to her in the night, and Rey had not believed, or wanted to believe, what they truly were. They had been so strange—and this third one, the one that is offered to her in meditation, is no different. 

Except—

This one is gentler, somehow. Hands in the soil, pale hands, young. Rey who is not Rey hums to herself as she turns over the rich earth. This is calming, peaceful. Rey’s eyes open, and the woman whose body she inhabits does as well. The two worlds, memory and reality, overlay atop one another. The forest, and a farmland. Now, and long ago. Perhaps a hundred years… 

She is happy here. The air is cool, and out in the fields, her sisters call out and respond to each other. This is a planting song. 

Then: The shattering. 

The soil crumbles in her hands, turning to dust. Weapons fire. The farmland burns. 

The girl is yanked upwards by a cruel, taloned hand, wrapped around her arm; she is screaming in fear. 

_ You know this pain, too, _ the kind, soft voice in Rey’s thoughts says.  _ Oh, desert girl. Of all the things we forget, why is this what we remember? _

Rey feels tears rolling down her cheeks. She is afraid, huddled with a group of other children in the belly of a rusted transport ship. It’s cold. Her garments are torn. She is shackled, and the pinch of pain, the feel of a chip being implanted in her upper arm, reverberates like a shockwave through her body. 

Slavers. 

Rey remembers seeing ones like these pass through Niima outpost, once or twice. She always steered clear of them. The rule of the desert, the rule of the junkyard world, was that anything which could be sold, would be. Parts or people, it was all the same; payment was payment. She did not want to end up with that fate. 

Not like this poor girl. This poor woman. 

The vision shimmers, and focuses once again. Another pain, a different one. Years have passed in slavery. She is in the desert, now. Alone and yet not. Hands, calloused and yet still young, rake through the sand. Tearing at it, digging, but the grains simply refill, again and again. She cannot even dig her own grave. 

Once again, Rey who is not Rey hums to herself, but this time, it is a song of grief, of utter despair.

_ How? _ The woman thinks.  _ How could this have happened? I don’t want this. I don’t want this. _

And the Force, bright and surging with more life than the barren, sandy planet she’s been taken to has ever seen, answers her. 

Rey cannot hear the answer. But the woman can, and she weeps, and she rages, and she demands an answer. 

_ Why did you choose me?  _

Rey surfaces out of the vision with a gasp. The wind is cool on her cheeks as she catches her breath; tears wet on her face from the woman’s grief. The overlay, the other-image, it’s gone. But the significance remains. This was not the same woman as before.This woman is… older. Further removed, Rey thinks. There’s a different shade to this woman’s light. She remained sweet and trusting. Good, and kind. Rey does not know her name, but there’s a maternal quality to the woman’s presence that makes an old, personal wound feel fresh. That yearning… that fear...

Wiping her hands on her pants absently, as if that could wipe away the resonant impression of the woman’s grief, Rey wonders at that same question. 

_ Why did you choose me? _

What was she chosen for? 

Why does the Force choose anybody? Oh, she’s read the texts, pieced together some of the old arcana, for lack of a better term. Some theories on heritability seem valid enough, but her sample size these days is exactly one. One family, one pained and broken family, burdened with more power, more light, more shadow, than any one line ought to bear. 

Rey, she’s nobody, though. 

_ But not to me… _

She shivers, and gets to her feet. Enough, no more of that. She resolves to put that moment out of her mind for now. There’s no grand line, no illustrious, Force-sensitive ancestry in Rey’s past, though. She is not the daughter of some powerful Jedi, she knows and accepts this now. She had pretended there was, for a long time, that there could be. But a lie is a lie, and Kylo Ren had been right. 

_ You’re nothing… _

Force, how those words had hurt. He had torn back every shielded thing, lanced the wound of her memories, revealed the painful infection of truth beneath. Rey had hated him for it. Only now, in this place, does she understand that it had been a kindness, a gift. 

She is free. Unlike him, Rey had been free. Burdened by loss, yes. Shackled by the chains of her own fear, the chains that had kept her grounded for so many dusty years, waiting and hoping on those who did not deserve her hope at all. But Rey had been born without the burden of lineage. Safe, in his mind, from the predator who targeted him, warped him, shaped him. Honed his bloodline into a blade. 

Even when she had been brought before him, Snoke had never even considered the possibility of her as an asset. Even when he had claimed to have been responsible for their strange connection… Rey had been worthless to him. But Ben, she knew, had never known peace, not from his first stirrings in the womb. He had always been marked. 

Rey looks into the forest; she remembers, unbidden, the first time she had seen Kylo’s face. When the mask had been taken away, revealing the almost sensitive face beneath it. His dark eyes, his full mouth, his strong features. The strangeness of his beauty—why had he concealed it? He was too sensitive, too expressive, and the mask had made it easier to pretend he was truly cruel.

_ You know I can take whatever I want... _

The way he had approached her, the way he had shuffled through her mind like a scrapper, looking for useful parts. Examining, sorting, discarding. Searching for meaning. Rey had never felt such obscene intimacy, his mind threaded through hers, and had recoiled. But now, she understood it for what it was, too. Desperation. Fascination. 

Like, calling to like. 

But if he had been born free—was that the boy who now ran in the woods, the construct, the Ben-who-was-not-Ben? An imagined, dreamed reality? 

A Ben who could’ve been free, like her. Good, like her. What would he have wanted, what would he have taken?

The memory of that freedom, perhaps. What it might have been like, inside a mind free to touch the Force, without that sick poison that had claimed him. 

Rey sighs, and turns back, heading in the direction of the river. It glints with late-afternoon light, and Rey doesn’t know whether she’s just guided there by the inborn, tantalizing prospect of water, or whether the Force is leading her there. 

Naturally, when she finds the river, there’s no trace of their game, her footprints, anything at all. 

_ Where are you, Ben? _

It’s as if this place remakes itself, every time she looks away.

Rey keeps following the river. She walks alone, until nightfall. There is no sign of the child at all.

It occurs to her that he always leaves her behind, and it’s starting to grate on her. Why, after promising to lead her, would he leave? 

* * *

In the darkest moments—when Snoke’s specific methods of instruction had left him crawling back to his chambers, shaking with pain, bruised and bloodied—Kylo Ren had hated his uncle for entirely different reasons.

The green of his uncle’s blade had haunted his nightmares for long before that first time, of course. But when Snoke had broken him, truly broken him, Kylo Ren had hated his uncle, that he had not struck true. 

Better to have died in that hut, Kylo Ren thinks. Better to have been martyred on the Skywalker altar, carved out like a rotten, fetid branch of an already-dying tree. Maybe his uncle had been correct, should’ve followed that terrible impulse. It would’ve saved the lives of the students who had fallen by his blade.

In the space where the Force now holds him, suspended between pain and oblivion, Kylo Ren can see their faces. Each and every one of them. He can hear their names, their voices. He can see the memory unfold, and it’s like every time this has happened, but more vivid. 

In his memory, he’s panicked, desperate. He’s just crawled out of the rubble of his little hut, Master Skywalker—his uncle—Luke—buried beneath the stones. 

The students, awakened not only by the noise, but by the disturbance in the Force, the anger and fear rolling off of him in feral waves, surge forward. 

Their sabers are already lit, guarded. 

The youngest one is only ten years old.

**_Fear is the path to the dark side._ **

And Ben is afraid. 

“What did you do?” 

“I didn’t—”

But it’s a lie; he has, and he does, every time the memory plays like a holovid in his mind. 

“Master Skywalker?” one of the students steps forward. 

Panicked, Ben raises his hand, force-pushes them back.

“D-don’t—”

“Knew you’d snap eventually,” an older student says. “Didn’t you all hear it? Don’t you know what he is?”

What he is. Not who.

What is he? 

**_Fear leads to anger._ **

Ben feels the anger rise, stinging bile in his throat. 

“I just want to go,” Ben says, but he knows that’s a lie, too. 

The crooning voice in his mind, that ever-present accompaniment to his self-loathing, smooths over his fear like a sudden wave, breaking over a child’s pile of sand; it amplifies his rage. How dare they question him. How dare they threaten. 

Don’t they know who he is?

Ben ignites his saber. 

**_Anger leads to hate._ **

The presence urges him to strike, but Ben fights it, grapples with it, even as he blocks the blows that rain down, from his circle of attackers. The drive him into the central training room, a place where sparring now turns to deadly combat. He cries out, he reaches to the beam overhead, tugging on the force. Like before, he brings the whole building down around them 

Not a stone touches his hair. 

He remains the only one unharmed—and he knows, it is not by his doing.

Ben stands in the center of the slaughter. He feels them, every single one of them, as they die. But it’s as if he’s watching himself from a distance. Something else has come over him. It writhes within him, pleasured and content and radiant. He feels  _ powerful _ . It feels  _ good _ . 

Ben sobs. 

**_Hate leads to suffering._ **

The presence compels him to flee the temple, so Ben steals a shuttle, tears tracing down the dust and soot on his face, and he pilots it without awareness. Something horrible and wonderful has consumed him. He feels transmuted, made new, but not clean. Every cell in his body glories in the rightness of this, an ascension, long-delayed, but the last remaining shred of his consciousness—the last piece which remains wholly and completely  _ Ben _ —screams and cries and struggles in the terror of what he has done. When it surfaces, his hands momentarily taking a tighter grip on the steering of the shuttle, the presence inside him sends a flick of reprimand. 

He is being conditioned to obey, and it’s couched as salvation, as awakening. The first in a long line of very effective lessons. 

_ Grandfather? _ Ben wonders. _ Is this what you wanted? _

The presence, whatever, whoever it is, sends out that soothing, placating wave.  _ Yes,  _ it says.  _ Yes. At last. Return to me, and I will give you a new and glorious name.  _

Ben resists it, but the terror within him makes the remainder of his conscience retreat. 

No. He isn’t Ben anymore. Ben died, too, back on that miserable planet. He wishes he had died then.

Wishes he could die now. But the Force does not relent. 

_ Let me die, _ Ben Solo thinks.  _ Let it end. Let this bloodline end. _

And from somewhere in the stars, Anakin Skywalker laughs. 

“Are you sure you want to leave now? She’s still looking for you, you know. Your scavenger.”

Ben can’t fully see him, but this…  _ this _ is the true presence that Snoke had been trying to impersonate. The Force, the living Force, assures him of it.

Ben has never spoken to this man before. But he  _ knows _ him. Here, in the formless, endless void that exists somewhere beyond consciousness, but at the moment just before death. Ben is not alone. 

Anakin Skywalker—the most feared, most hated man in all of galactic history, in all of Ben’s history—makes a noise that’s…

Is he laughing?

“The irony of all this,” Anakin says. “Forget the Dark SIde; someone really ought to have warned us about the dangerous allure of persistent brunettes.”

In his coffin-like pod, Ben’s body struggles to take a breath. The pain in his body overwhelms his ability to think, or to articulate his tempest-tossed thoughts. He fights against the vision, instinctively fearful of more reprimands. Terrified of a ghost who had been severed quite cleanly through. 

This is not that ghost. 

“Well,” Anakin says, both amused and resigned. “You’ve been trying to get through to me for years, now. I know you have questions… but I want you to listen, first.”

Ben closes his eyes—maybe they’ve been closed the whole time, and maybe, instead, he opens them. The less he struggles against the memories, against the truth, the more his pain eases. He nods. 

* * *

The boy comes back, just as Rey is starting an evening fire.

He steps into the little clearing she’s found, and waits there, as if to be invited in. 

Rey looks up, comforted, not startled, by his sudden appearance. She gestures for him to come in, and he does. 

“I brought something to eat,” he mutters, folding his lanky frame down beside the tiny fire.

Rey glances at him, still carefully feeding twigs to the infant flame. It’s too dark to tell, but—

“What are you, Ben?” Rey says. “Or… Bail, or whatever it is you want to call yourself. I can’t sense you in the force, you leave every time I…”

Her voice trails off. 

Across from her, Ben hangs his head. The growing flames highlight his features, sharpness contrasting with the latent softness of his jaw. 

“You know me,” Rey says, softly. “You know me, don’t you, Ben?”

He nods. 

“Then why pretend… what  _ are  _ you?”

He shrugs. Rey scoffs, and tries a different angle. 

“I know who you are,” Rey says, her voice barely louder than the soft snap of the flames. “Who you truly are.”

She looks at him, this not-Bail, this Ben, this other-Ben, expecting a reaction. Anger, maybe. Rage, or protest.

Instead, he just looks… wistful. Curious. Sad. 

“You do?” 

Force, those words, in that voice, send a shiver through her body. A memory, from a very different moment. His voice, now, bears all the tone of youth; he does not yet sound like a man. Like he did, the last time she heard those words. The boy just smiles. He shakes his head. 

“Here, we can eat these.”

He unloads his harvest onto the cloak she’s spread on the ground, to sit upon. Fruits, berries. Some kind of edible plants that Rey cannot identify. Then, the thin curl of bark, from another pocket, and a tiny knife. Rey startles when she sees that he has this; a red gem glints on the handle, a tiny reminder of the weapon she’d last seen him carry. 

If Ben notices her reaction, he does not look up. Instead, as she builds the fire to a tidy little blaze, Ben carefully fashions a bowl-like object from the bark. Folding it up, pinning the corners—a clever creation. 

“Where’d you learn to make that?” Rey asks him. 

At this, he does look up. “M’dad taught me.”

“Oh.” Rey does not want to press him further. If this is Ben, all of Ben, and yet a child still… that’s much more complicated—much more heated—than she has the energy to deal with at the moment. 

“You can roast these,” Ben says, finding one of her kindling twigs and spearing one of the flared plants on the end. “They’re good.”

“I’ve never had one.”

“Better than veg-meat,” Ben says, with a wry tilt to his mouth. 

“Anything’s better than that,” Rey agrees. “Except starvation…”

Ben smiles, catching the undercurrent of her dark, wry humor, seeing it for what it is. 

His smile is… beautiful, she thinks. Still innocent, still childlike. Force, she would’ve liked to have met him like this, before… before everything happened. 

“You wouldn’t have wanted that,” Ben says, quietly. 

Rey startles. Then, relaxes.  _ Of course, the Force bond.  _

“Sorry,” he mutters. “I wasn’t… you were just projecting it. I won’t look.”

“It’s alright,” Rey says, placing her forgotten shields back into place firmly, but not unkindly. It’s just that he’s a child, or at least still in a child’s body, and there are so many complex feelings she has, and questions, and memories… no, the connection eases closed, Rey is sure of that. 

“What’s this, then?” Rey picks up one of the fruits, a round, firm thing with a leathery, bumpy skin. 

“Chandrilan spicefruit,” Ben says. “You have to peel it, the fruit’s inside. But you can candy the peel, with sugar. It’s nice.”

“I—I thought those could only be cultivated on Chandrila?” Rey doesn’t know how she knows it; she simply does. “Are we on Chandrila?”

Ben shakes his head. “No. I just… they were my favorite. I thought you would like them.”

This fruit isn’t real. _ Is it? _ Rey examines it as best she can in the firelight. It smells real when she brings it to her nose; it feels real, when she pierces the skin with her nails. Ben, or whatever he is right now, prods at the fire with a stick, opening up an area with embers, to better roast the items he’s speared. The fire moves—but  _ he isn’t real.  _

_ Is he?  _

Rey stops puzzling, and peels the fruit. She hasn’t been hungry, all this time; now, her stomach growls, awakened and eager. 

Her nails dig in. As she does, little sprays of scent greet her, and the flesh, beneath the wrinkled, tough exterior, is purpled and soft. Rey dips in, removes a segmented piece, and takes a bite. 

Flavor explodes on her tongue. Savory, sweet, chased with a hint of some kind of tart spice. It’s delicious. She’s never had anything like it. 

Ben is watching her. 

Gently, as gently as he had given her the fruit, he offers her a memory. 

He’s twelve years old, and tomorrow is his birthday. His mother sits at her desk, by a tall window, focused on her holopad, frowning. He goes to the kitchen, banging his shin on a low table as he does, unfamiliar with his rapidly-growing body. His father is in the kitchen, mixing… something… in a bowl. 

Rey watches as the memory unspools, like a holovid. It’s so different from the visions, the dreams, this place has given her. She is not in his body, but she watches, passive and detached, as the memory plays on. 

“Hey, kiddo,” Han says. “Can you make any sense of this? C’mere.”

Ben does. He slides along the counter, shuffling in his socks, looking down at where his father’s flower-dusted hand is pointing. 

A recipe. 

Ben beams up at his father, pleased and a little amused at having so easily determined a cause. “You forgot to cream the butter and sugar first.”

Han gives his son an exasperated look, then looks down into the recipe. He makes a ‘huh’ noise. Ben laughs. 

“Well,” Han says, prodding the bowl of mush. “Can’t say I didn’t at least make an attempt. Whadya think, should we bake it anyway, see how it turns out?”

Ben shrugs. “Sure.”

“This is why we have droids, you know,” Leia calls to the pair of them, from her office, not even looking up. 

Ben stiffens. It happens so quickly that Han, who’s turning the other way, looking for a pan in the cupboards, doesn’t see it. 

But Rey does. And Rey understands, in a flash, why Ben had reacted that way. An older, deeper, much more distressing memory, involving a kitchen droid. 

“I’m sure it’ll be fine, kiddo,” Han says to his son, conspiratorially. “And if it’s not, we’ll just sneak out and get you—”

“I can still hear you two, you know,” Leia says. 

Han rolls his eyes, a roguish grin on his face. “—you and me, kid, we’ll think of something.”

Ben nods. 

Later, when the smoke fills the kitchen, and the alarm system goes off, Ben realizes that nobody had thought to check the cake at all. When they do go out for a meal, Leia gets twelve comms before desert arrives, and Han argues with her about politics, and Ben sits between them, still smelling the smoke and the spicefruit on his skin. 

The memory ends. 

Rey looks across the flames, and sees Ben, that same age in the memory, carefully pulling the roasted morsels off of his stick. 

“It feels wrong of me, to show you that,” he says. 

“Why?”

He glances at her, fingers careful on the still-hot pieces. “Because I know you… you never had that at all. A family. Even a… flawed one.”

In another time, in another place, the words could’ve pierced her, could’ve been cruel. But they’re soft, and his voice, still childlike and unbroken, is kind. It’s true, at any rate. Rey never had a birthday, burnt cake or no. She doesn’t even know when it is, if she’d wanted to celebrate it. But—

“Pain is pain,” she says, quietly. “There’s a point at which you… you simply stop trying to compare it, one pain to another. We both were set aside, I suppose.”

“They were idiots,” Ben says, a tint of his usual ferocity creeping into his childish voice. “Both of them.”

Rey recoils slightly. Han and Leia weren’t perfect, but they did their best—

“Your parents, I mean,” he clarifies. “Mine were… but you? You didn’t deserve that. You didn’t deserve to be left behind.”

“Ben…”

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, head bowed, ashamed. Dark hair covers his face, but Rey can see his full mouth, now a little less childlike. “For leaving. I’m sorry. I know you don’t—I’m sorry. I won’t leave you again.”

Rey feels a warmth blanket her that has nothing to do with the fire. “Alright. I’d… like that.”

He nods. Hands her one of the cooked pieces. 

It’s delicious. 


	6. endure

_endure:_

  * _suffer (something painful or difficult) patiently._
  * _remain in existence; last._



* * *

Between last night, and this new morning, he’s changed once more. Grown a little older. He’s shy when he wakes, too—rolling away from her and loping off into the grass as she heads in the opposite direction, each needing privacy. They return to the river, washing their hands, their faces. Drinking from the cold, clear stream. He finds some of the uneaten fruit and the bark bowl of roasted roots, and they share a small meal, more social than satiating. Once again, she is not physically hungry. But it’s nice to be with someone, to eat together. To examine him, and indulge in the curiosity she has for _this_ version of Ben Solo.

Now that Ben is Rey’s height, it’s impossible to pretend he isn’t changing every day. First a young child, who had pretended to be something else. Then a frightened one, a little older, still hiding in a dream. Then, the one who had been honest with her last night, who had shared a piece of his memories, and a meal with her. But today…  

This Ben is definitely not a child. He’s a young man—fifteen, perhaps. Tousle-haired, as awkward as he is dashing. The last traces of his babyish face are gone.

He looks… he looks like his father.

To Rey, it is as undeniable as it is fascinating. “So, where do we go today?” Rey asks him.

Ben squints a little as he looks to the horizon. “West. To the mountain, just there… I think.”

Rey jolts a little; his voice has changed as well. Not fully dropped, not yet familiar, but changed.

“You _think?_ ” she asks, wiping her hands on a patch of dew-damp grass to clean them. “How do you know?”

He looks at her and shrugs. “I don’t.”

Rey wants to laugh at this, or roll her eyes. It’s such an exasperating answer. And the gesture, the way he moves in his new, tall, rangy body, it reminds her so much of the way Han had carried himself. A bit of swagger, tempered with a characteristic defiance, the stubborn set of his jaw that’s all his mother.

Rey shakes her head, and exhales sharply. What an exasperating contradiction, this version Ben Solo is. Is he an illusion, too? He certainly doesn't seem so childlike.

“You don’t know,” Rey says, and she looks back down at her meal. Finally, she sets it down on the ground, and wipes her hands on her trousers.

“I just wanted you to follow me,” he says, sounding very young, a little frightened. Then, he clears his throat, straightens up a little. “I didn’t mean to—”

“No,” Rey says. “No, it’s alright.”

She understands.

But the fact remains: _He_ doesn’t know, and _she_ certainly doesn’t know, because the Force isn’t telling her anything today. It’s just lurking back, watchful, expectant. She catalogues her resources, a habit born of years of survival: No arm wraps, no pack, no rations, no broken saber… Nothing but visions and shadows, formless guides that come to her in dreams. And this guide, who tells her they need to go to the mountain.

The mountain. She lifts her eyes, and looks at it. Up ahead, in the mist which rapidly fades in the morning light, the mountain strikes a beautiful image to her eyes. It recalls the angular shape of a downed Imperial ship, if she squints a little and tilts her head. A long slope along the left side, and the side facing the field and the valley in which they have made their camp, with a craggy break on the right, suggesting a path that’s much more jagged, more challenging. Rey isn’t looking forward to mountaineering. But, absent any better ideas, west is where they go. There’s a wind at their back, a feeling in the Force, which guides her on.

“Well,” Rey says, impatient, senses still searching for the Force to guide her, still frustrated that it all seems to cycle back to this construct who stands before her. “Let’s go, then.”

Ben smiles at her, a shy smile that’s a quarter of a way to a smirk, and nods. Rey takes one last look around their space; There’s no real camp to strike and nothing much to clean when they go. But still, something nags at her. Despite the welcoming blanket of this place, his presence, his vow not to leave…

Her strange guide takes a step forward; Rey doesn’t move.

“Wait.”

Ben turns back to look at her.

He’s still somehow wearing the same outfit, though; a scaled-up version, made for someone who is nearly Rey’s height: Brown tunic, blue pants, scuffed, worn boots over much larger feet. Of course he would’ve shot up young, Rey thinks, carefully guarding her thoughts from him as she surveys him. He’s lean, though, still a bit to the scrawny side. Not the broad-shouldered man he had been, when he’d first stood before her—when he’d carried her away from the forest of Takodana.

“Are you… _what_ are you?” Rey doesn’t know how else to ask. “I’ve been wondering from the start. I can’t sense you in the Force. You’re not a child. But you’re not… you’re not him. Are you?”

“I’m…” His expression bears the faint traces of panic when he looks around. As if the answers are elusive, or frightening. “I don’t know what I am. I’m what you want me to be.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I can give you.”

Rey sighs, and rubs at the bridge of her nose. Peace. Focus. Calm. She strains towards it, completely defeating the purpose of any type of meditative exercise. And this infuriatingly beautiful mess of a planet surrounds her, pulsing with life, and with frustration. This is an older frustration, deeper than she knows. How many times, Rey wonders, has he been asked to explain something which cannot be explained?

 _Too many,_ his sorrow seems to answer.

The shadows on the walls of his nursery.

The cold hands, the voice, the fear.

The shattered things that trailed in his wake.

The damage. The decay. The loss.

Every single thing that he has taken, or broken.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly.

Ben looks at her, surprise and resignation and acceptance written in his adolescent features. He nods. “I’m sorry, too. I wish I understood. I think I’m… I’m a part of him. A part that… maybe a part that is more how he wants you to see him. Instead of… who he is.”

Rey feels a hot slide of wetness on her cheek. Abruptly, she raises her hand, wiping at the tears there.

“Is he alive,” she asks, desperate. “Please tell me if he’s alive. I didn’t come all this way to… You’re not a—”

 _A ghost._ The superstitious scavengers talked about them sometimes, the spirits of the officers and rebels who had gone down with their ships. Dusty skeletons of various humanoid species, bleached by the sun. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

Hastily, Ben shakes his head. “No. He’s… I’m still alive. But… struggling.”

“To live?”

Ben pauses. Then he just shakes his head; sadness runs deep in the unfathomable, ageless dark of his eyes. He is fifteen, and yet he is not. Perhaps he is older than the planet itself. Perhaps he has only been born a moment ago.

Ben, the real Ben, is fighting to die. Rey knows this. Neither of them can say it.

So, Rey wipes her tears, and she smiles.

“I need answers,” she says. “Something called me here. Maybe it was the Force, or maybe it was you. Either way... “

“Okay. Ask me.” His voice is quiet. Resolute. More mature than the years would, should allow. “Ask me what you want to know, then.”

* * *

The problem is clearly external. Hux knows this for certain. He knows he is well, perfectly healthy, as healthy as a man in his prime could possibly be. Therefore, the fault lies somewhere else.

Hux dismisses the droids, when the second scan proves inconclusive. With a sweep of rage that he tells himself is merely practicality, he marks all droids of that model for decommissioning. Best to be safe. One flawed design could mean an error through all of them, and he can’t have that. His plan requires precision. He hasn’t done what he’s done to let some droid ruin things.

Hux rises for the day, and goes about his routine ablutions. A three-minute standard sonic shower, the same uniform, no appeal to luxury or vanity. The same combing of his hair, the same sweep of scentless pomade which fixes it into tidy arrangement. His quarters are as they were the night before, and the night before that, and before that. The only concession Hux makes to this… foulness, whatever this momentary disengagement of his pure purpose and consciousness is, is a brief trip to the secure panel in his quarters. Hux slowly withdraws the saber of his conquered foe. Tests the weight of the ancient weapon in his gloved palm. Glares down at the wreck of is design, all rough cuts and wires. He sees the red pommel, turns it this way and that.

_Red._

The glint of red, the sparking memory of the sputtering of this very blade, makes something within him clench. Nausea, fierce and horrible, overtakes him; once again, his pulse races, his head swims.

_Voices._

So many voices.

Hux puts down the saber, slaps his hand against the panel, seals it, once more, to his own biometric data.

Some… some resonance, some imprint, perhaps. Scientific, not mystic. Something explainable, observable, measurable, that lay behind the way Ren and his knights and all of those wretched Force-users—

This is his doing. Even from beyond the grave, such as it was.

This is not him.

He, Hux, is free of that stain, that pollution.

He is well.

He must be well.

Any other option is… impossible.

Hux pushes the nausea and the fear and the panic down, straightens up, and strides out the door. Today will be the same as it ever was. He is clear-minded and his purpose is focused. He will not allow anything to sway him. Not mysticism, not superstition. Not flawed design or faulty wiring. Not the memory of the weight of Ren's weapon in his gloved hands, or the red, blinding red, or the voices.

No. He will not allow it. 

Everything is under control. 

* * *

Rey shivers, and, as if in response, the sun finally crests up over the edge of the mountain. Her eyes flicker towards it once more; Had they always been journeying towards a mountain? Something tells her that this is new, but… this place, ever-changing… something like a chirp sounds in her ear, an alert sounded by a bird that also doesn’t exist, in a forest which probably bears no trace of their passage, either.

“Will I be able to find my way back to the Falcon?” she asks. “Will I be able to go back?”

He nods.

“And will I be able to find my way to… to you? To your body, wherever you are?”

He nods again. But, it’s a little less decisive. He won’t meet her eyes.

“Do you have _anything_ helpful whatsoever to— What am I supposed to be doing here?” She’s trying so hard not to get frustrated, but this whole situation, walking for hours, vague answers, some resonant teenage surliness that’s perhaps shared across their bond…

“If I knew—”

“Your whole _kriffing_ family speaks in the vaguest terms possible,” Rey turned, and kicked at a nearby rock, sending it sailing through the air and plonking into the stream. “Which isn’t helpful _whatsoever…_ Why can’t you just speak plainly?”

“If I knew, I would say,” Ben finishes, matching her mood. There’s something in the set of his shoulders, his bared teeth, that instantly recalls the moment he had pressed her, their sabers clashing, in that snowy forest, on Starkiller. And yet, he is still just a boy. Such power, contained within him. How alluring he must have been, Rey thinks, just the faintest suggestion of that power, all wrapped up in the perfect malleable package. An innocent infant. 

Overhead, the faintest of clouds pass across the sun.

Rey closes her eyes. Breathes, centers herself.  

“Do you think I like this?” he continues, but the rage has drained back out of his voice, to be replaced with pain and grief. “I feel _everything_ he feels. I know what he knows, but it’s… distorted. He doesn’t want me talking to you. He doesn’t want any of this. Would you want someone... rummaging around in your consciousness?”

Rey opens her eyes. Fixes him with a look.

“Right,” he says softly, glancing away. “The… okay, you’re right.”

She sighs. “What happened?”

The look of grief, the sag of his not-yet-broad shoulders, it’s an adult’s weariness on an adolescent frame. Ben turns, and looks across the horizon. “Hux. There was… he put something into the ventilation system, I think. A poison, I don’t know. When I… when he… we woke and, the Force just… wasn’t there.”

“A toxin? A sedative?”

“Yes,” Ben says, frowning. “And something else. I don’t know what it was. It happened so quickly.”

They begin to walk; Rey follows. Her strange guide, who is solid enough to push apart the waist-high grass as he walks the path before her, but not solid enough, not real enough, to sense in the Force. She is fascinated by him.

“He shot me, and I died,” Ben continues, glancing back at her, as if to ensure that she’s still following him as he walks. “I _think_ I died. But… Then I woke up here, when the ship landed. When I saw you.”

“And between those two points? Those two moments?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing.”

But Rey knows that isn’t entirely the truth. It’s _a_ truth, as he knows it, but it’s as if this version of Ben is blocked from other, deeper, older parts of his own mind.

 _I am what you wanted to see_ , she thinks. _Maybe you called to me, and you didn’t even mean to. Maybe you—_

“Careful,” Ben says; Rey’s foot catches on a rock, and she stumbles, just a little. The terrain has become rocky as the slope of the hill has begun to increase. Once again, time is being playful with them; they’d only just started walking, hadn’t they? She glances back, at the deep valley behind them, the river, the distant forest. There seems to be no clearing at all large enough to have set a ship down.

Something in this place, however, tells her not to concern herself with appearances.

“Not much farther, now,” Ben says, and he smiles.

* * *

Somewhere in the void, the man who was Kylo Ren is suspended, against his will, in a darkness he cannot escape, either to die, or to live. This in-between realm holds him in thrall, and the dreams, the visions of the past moments which his family line has lived through and endured have given way to one singular being. A presence. The only presence Kylo has ever begged to see. 

“Listen,” Anakin Skywalker says, his form just starting to take shape before Kylo's unseeing eyes, a shadow-shape in the Force itself. “I want you to understand what I am saying: The lie I told myself to be who I was? It was the lie that I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t trust her enough to tell her the truth. I was afraid.”

 _Her_ , Kylo thinks. He’s speaking of… Padme, Ben’s grandmother. But in his thoughts, Kylo conjures a different image.

At this, Anakin laughs; he knows what Ben is thinking, before Ben can even try and conceal it. “Yeah. I like her. Padme would’ve loved her.”

“What do I do?” Kylo says, or thinks… he’s not too clear on the mechanics of whatever this place is. When he looks down, there’s no body at all to look at. Just darkness. But the idea of his body clings to him the same way that the idea of his name clings. He hasn't been Kylo since Rey touched his hand. Perhaps, since he first felt her gaze on his bare face. 

He looks back up.

Anakin stands before him. Kylo... _Ben_ does not recognize him so much as feel the truth of him, the same sorrow in his blood, the same weakness. But instead of being a formidable black figure, there’s no mask, no black robes, no armor. Just a man, Ben’s age, clad in an indistinct smudge of tans and browns. The form isn’t important. But Ben is struck by his presence nonetheless. _Grandfather_ , he thinks

“Why didn’t you help me?” Ben asks. “If you were watching, and you never helped, not once, why _—_ ”

“Ben, listen,” Anakin repeats again. “Visions are tricky things. There was a time when I trusted in them. Too much. I believed that I could… change things. I believed that I could shape the future all on my own. Do you understand? Do you see where I went wrong?”

Ben sees.

He pages backwards, through the visions that Anakin offers. They’re terrible, awful things, and Ben wants to look away. This, this, is this what he had begged for, when he’d prayed before the shrine of his family’s pain? Death and destruction. Children, _oh Force, the children_ , he can’t look _—_

 _Look,_ Anakin says. “Is _this_ what you asked to see? Would this have inspired you? Given focus to your mission? ”

“No,” Ben says. If he had a head, he would shake it. If he had eyes, he would close them.

"Would you have finished this work?" Anakin presses further, like a lance piercing a badly-healed wound. Painful, necessary. "Is this the calling you truly would've fulfilled? Your destiny?"

"No, no." Ben gasps. "Never." 

“If I had answered you, you would’ve seen this, all of this,” Anakin says quietly. “The man I tried to be, and the man I became. What would you have learned, then?”

Ben doesn’t know.

“Fear,” Anakin says. “Fear is the path to the dark side. And you’ve always been afraid. But you don’t have to be alone. Not if you trust in what the Force has given you. You have been given a different path. Our sins, my sins, they don't have to weigh on your shoulders any longer. Only if you choose to keep them there. Do you understand?”

He does. 

The acceptance pierces him, and Ben cries out into nothingness. He doesn't want to live with this pain, but the alternative makes the Force itself cry out. This is not his time. This is not his path. Only then does he realize that he is not alone in his consciousness. 

Rey is here. 

 

* * *

“So I can ask you… anything?”

They’ve been walking for some time, the terrain getting rougher under their feet as they go. The ground has begun to steadily slope upwards. In front of her, Ben shrugs. It’s as good as a yes. So Rey considers her next words the way she considers the path at her feet.

 _Why is_ this _how he wants me to see him?_ Rey wonders. She considers how best to phrase the question. To ask what she really wants to ask.

“Is this how old you were, the age you are now, I mean.. when you went to train with Luke?”

Ben stiffens a little, a reflex action, and then relaxes. “No. Although that’s when mom wanted to send me. She said I—”

“What?”

“The dreams…” Ben sighs, and shakes his head. “And everything else. I thought about just stealing one of the diplomatic shuttles and going out to find… Dad. Or sneaking aboard one of the diplomatic vessels. But mom always knew.”

Leia was Force-sensitive, Rey thought; naturally, she would’ve known.

“She wanted to send you to your uncle, but she wouldn’t let you leave?”

“She didn’t want me out on my own terms. Stealing a ship, or turning into my… my father,” Ben answered. “I guess I didn’t want that either.”

Rey weighed her next question carefully. “When you—”

“Don’t,” Ben said, his voice cracking on the word, stopping in his tracks.

Rey backs off. There are some things that she know he’ll be compelled to answer, and she doesn’t want to ask them until she’s ready to hear the truth.

They walk.

“Did you know, even then, that Snoke was…”

“No.” Ben says the word sharply. Then, a little softer: “I didn’t know, until it was too late.”

“It’s not too late.”

Rey knows she’s said these words to him before. She meant them then, and she means them now. This time, it seems as if he is considering them. Ben’s gaze fixes on hers.

“If you’re here… if he’s alive, then it’s not too late for you. Not unless you’ve given up hope in yourself.”

“Why do you even care, what happens to… to him? To me?” Ben asks her this with no malice in his voice. Only soft curiosity, genuine and sad.

Rey steps forward, up the slope. She’s surefooted on even the most dangerous wrecks, but her attention is justifiably unfocused. As she moves, her foot lands on a loose rock, instead of on solid ground, and she cries out, sharply, as her ankle twists.

She starts to slip sideways. Time speeds up, slows down; she looks down at the now-precarious slope they’d just been climbing, feels her hip hit the ground, feels herself start to slide.

A solid hand clasps her own. Halts her fall.

Rey looks up. Up, into those dark eyes.

This is the first time she's touched him, this physical form; it feels warm enough, real enough, and yet Rey's hand surges with little aftershocks that speak of a deeper, resonant power. The Force. Not the way she experiences it, but... somehow, the way _he_ does. Sparking and wild. As natural as a lightning storm, and twice as powerful. 

“I’ve got you,” he says quietly.

Stunned by the feeling of him, the solidity, the form, the truth that she knows cannot be true, Rey allows him to pull her up. As he does, the edge of her belt catches on the rock, and the clasp breaks as she scrambles up the cliff. Her belt, the gun, the holster, it all goes tumbling down the mountainside.

Together, they find their way to a steadier outcropping, catching their breath. The dust that had risen in the air from her fall is hovering, just starting to settle. Rey’s hand feels alert and aware at each point of contact. Slowly, Ben pulls his own hand back, lowers his gaze.

They watch the gun fall down to the bottom of the mountain. In the distance, the golden grass sways and dances in the wind.

“You okay?” Ben says.

Rey nods. She doesn't need to defend herself from him, here in this place. 

“I am,” she says.

So they turn, and continue picking their way higher and higher, up the mountain. 


End file.
